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Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Dubonnet Gin Cocktail and Thank You

Made from French fortified wine marketed under the name Dubonnet and a good London gin, this refreshing libation is well known for being the favorite tipple of the late Queen Mother and her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II.

Like the queen, this blog has two birthdays. The first one was just a few weeks ago marking the date I created Food Lust People Love as a Tumblr blog. It didn’t take me long to realize that Tumblr, at least in its native form, didn’t work for what I wanted to achieve with this blog so I changed over to Blogger and I added the 12 Tumblr posts all in one day – 24 June 2011, to be precise. So that’s the official blog birthday I celebrate each year.

My very first post is still one of my favorites. It wasn’t even a recipe, but a series of photos from a recent trip we had taken to Italy of the market in Florence. I want to live there! Who's coming with me?

That said, my early food photos are laughably bad. Post number two was a delicious dessert made with whipped cream, meringues and blackberries. With the ugliest photo. I’m not kidding. And yeah, I’m going to make you go look if you really want to because it’s just too awful to add again here. *Shudder*

Without further ado, I’d like to share a cocktail with you that I raise in thankful salute to all the people who have supported me in this three-year journey. To my family and close friends first and foremost, for putting up with my experiments, for waiting to eat while I take photos of the food and for allowing me to tell their stories and share their photos on occasion. To my fellow bloggers who have taught me so much about food photography, website optimization and social media with generosity of spirit and endless camaraderie. And finally, to you, my readers. You leave me kind comments and send me recipe suggestions. You share links to my posts with your own friends and family. You give me great joy and it is my privilege to meet you in this space. Thank you!

As I was researching this drink, I found recipes that varied depending on whether it was the Queen Mother who was drinking it or Queen Elizabeth, the former preferring more gin than Dubonnet and the latter preferring more Dubonnet than gin, so feel free to mix yours however you like. I went with Queen Elizabeth’s two-to-one proportions.

Ingredients
Twist of lemon and lime peel
2 oz or about 60ml Dubonnet
1 oz or about 30ml good quality gin
Ice (The queen reportedly likes three cubes of ice. What is it with the British and their dislike of ice?!)

Method
Add the twists of lemon and lime to your glass along with the ice.

Cooking for people I love, creating deliciousness out of fresh ingredients, browsing through cookbooks for inspiration, perusing grocery shelves for choice items and writing about my expat life enriched by food. That's what I do here.